Emmanuel Kelly tells judges his mom is his hero, then sings everyone into tears.

Even if you’re not a fan of shows like American Idol and its X Factor spin-offs (guilty), you can’t help but be moved by this audition in Australia (guilty again!).

It features Emmanuel Kelly, a guy with an astounding life story, not the least of which includes the fact that he can’t tell judges exactly how old he is, since he isn’t sure himself. The handsome Kelly and his equally handsome brother were found in a shoebox in Iraq back in the 1990s, and taken to an orphanage. Continue reading »

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Court ruling or no, how do you give up your child — even if it is to her birth mother?

My heart goes out today to a little girl and her parents — all three of them.

A Guatemalan girl was apparently kidnapped in 2006 and smuggled of her native country by a child trafficking ring under a new name and adopted by a couple in the United States. It was reportedly unbeknownst to the U.S. couple that the little girl was wrongfully taken from her mother.

Five years after the girl was snatched, a judge in Guatemala is ordering the couple to return their adopted daughter to her birth mother, who is represented by the human rights group, the Survivors’ Foundation.

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Compared with like socio-economic groups, there's a language gap between adopted and native-born kids.

Even though plenty of studies have shown that young kids adopted from abroad develop language skills comparable to the rest of the population over time, a new study has found that they don’t master the language as well as their native-born peers.

The study looked at China-born children adopted by French-speaking families in Quebec and found that when compared to peers from similar households, the China-born kids didn’t master the language as well as. The difference wasn’t huge, but it was statistically reliable.

There’s good news though: Continue reading »

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Imagine Adoption was supposed to help kids like these find homes.

Two years ago, trustees of the Cambridge, Ontario-based Imagine Adoption Agency discovered “questionable” spending in the firm’s records. Today, the founder and general manager stand accused of defrauding the agency of over $420,000.

The agency matched children from Ghana and Ethiopia with Canadians eager to adopt. Imagine declared bankruptcy in July, 2009, which literally left hundreds of families who were midway through the process up in the air.

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Have you fallen for some of these adoption myths?

In writing about all matters of parenting for the past few years, I’ve learned that some topics are divisive among the readers no matter what I have to say on the matter. Other topics elicit comments that are so predictable, the cynical side of me thinks I should probably just save readers the time and write the responses myself. The more generous side of me concedes, however, that these divisive topics and predictable comments demonstrate the complicated emotions we have around particular subjects.

One of those subjects is adoption and since November is National Adoption Month, we should talk about it.

Here’s how things often go: in nearly every post on assisted reproductive technologies or repeated pregnancy loss, someone writes in suggesting (often in the form of hammering it over the author’s head) that the family stop with the pregnancy nonsense and adopt a child. Wait, there’s more. Continue reading »

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U.S. and Russia may reach an agreement soon

It looks like Moscow and Washington may soon sign an agreement guaranteeing the rights of Russian children in international adoptions with the United States. The issue has been in dispute since April, when a registered nurse from Shelbyville, Tenn., who had adopted a 7-year-old boy from a Russian orphanage, sent him back to Moscow – on an airplane, by himself, carrying a handwritten note describing him as “violent,” with “severe psychopathic issues.”

As a result of that incident, which touched off an international outcry, Moscow had threatened to prohibit any U.S. adoptions from Russian children (which is the third most common source of international U.S. adoptions, behind China and Ethiopia) until an agreement guaranteeing the children’s rights had been signed.

But now, UPI reports, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Andrei Nesterenko, has indicated that an agreement between the United States and Russia “intended to provide solid guarantees of adopted children’s rights” could be signed by the end of this year, though the U.S. State Department has yet to say whether an agreement had been reached.

The news of progress must come as quite a relief for the more than 3,000 Americans waiting to welcome children from Russia into their families.

Photo: tinou bao

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Lori Gertz and her adopted daughter, Ellie

“Adoption is a phoenix; a miracle that arises from the ashes of despair. A baby is abandoned, a family lost and a whole new world gained,” writes our friend and former Strollerderby blogger K.J. Dell’Antonia on the NYT’s Motherlode blog.  In a beautifully crafted and heartfelt piece, she goes on to detail some of the less joyous parts of the adoption process, like removing a child from a caring foster family in order to provide them with a permanent home and secure future.

Dell’Antonia adopted her daughter, Rory, from China, where she lived in a loving foster home from age 2 months to 4 years.  “Over and over again in the past year, my daughter has buried herself in her bed, screaming for her mommy, and we both know that I am not the mommy she’s crying for,” Dell’Antonia says.  But she hopes that “having been raised by a loving family will make it easier for my daughter to love me,” adding, “If she can, with my help, bounce back from the trauma of losing that family, she’ll emerge as a stronger, more self-confident and more empathetic person.”

I have no doubt K.J. and Rory will have a wonderful life together.  But what happens when an adoption goes sour?  When the promise of a beautiful baby turns into a child you just can’t cope with?  Case in point: Lori Gertz, the Illinois mother who recently sent her adopted daughter to live with another family because she couldn’t handle her child’s intense symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome. Continue reading »

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